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Mobile Business Intelligence Puts Data on the Road

Decision making is not something that happens only in the back office or the boardroom. Decisions are made on the road, in warehouses, in client meetings and in airport lounges. The decision maker often needs only quick access to a few key metrics shown on a mobile device. This can reduce decision bottlenecks, increase business process performance and enable broader input into the decision at hand. With the proliferation of tablet devices, consumers and vendors alike are coming to see mobile business intelligence (BI) as a reality for finally putting data on the road.

A Bit of History

In the early years, if you wanted to make decisions away from your office and needed data, such as sales figures, production reports or customer details, you had to bring it on paper. The laptop hadn’t been invented and there was no other device to give you quick data access. If you needed data, you had to bring binders — and lots of patience.

Even with the arrival of the laptop, in approximately 1990, the limited attempts at reporting were largely affected by the PC platform’s lack of disk space, memory, CPU speed and graphical capabilities. Plus, slow download times meant users still had to copy their data before leaving the office.

Ten years later the BlackBerry arrived. While it became a wildly successful device among business users for email, it flopped as a BI device, and so did other smartphones running early version of Windows Mobile. The main reason: A small screen size that couldn’t adequately portray charts and the accompanying text. Who wants to navigate to a specific bar or pie chart segment with a trackball? So, mobile BI never took flight as organizations, for the most part, ignored handheld devices for the delivery of BI content.

Inflection Point

The arrival of Apple’s iPad in April, 2010 heralded the ideal BI consumption device. The first large BI vendor that announced an iPad version of its BI platform was MicroStrategy, which demonstrated its mobile BI application capabilities at a European conference in June 2010. Other vendors quickly followed. The end-user community saw the gesture-driven tablet as the ideal device to bring highly interactive BI applications to the front line. Although the original focus of organizations was firmly on the Apple products, Android is, and Microsoft will be, alternative tablet platforms. Whatever the choice, the time for mobile BI is finally here.

Think of it this way: The obvious benefit for executives is not only the “coolness” factor, but the tablet computer’s ability to deliver information literally to their fingertips. The tablet is also a very convenient device. Previously, executives didn’t carry laptops. Instead, they asked an assistant to fetch some information. But now, with tablet computers, they are self-sufficient, don’t need to learn complex reporting tools, have access to up-to-date information and can concentrate on their real jobs: making business decisions.

There are three components at play that make the new wave of decision making so interesting:

1 Good old BI — that’s the baseline and what we have known for a long time. It builds reports on mostly transactional data, typically targeting finance, sales and marketing departments. Modern BI infrastructures also monitor events and send alerts to users.

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